Melbourne Cup Weekend

With the deep low pressure system that was hanging around Victoria for a few days last week, flying in the northeast was 2 days out. Some pilots from Belbourne had aerotows at the airstrip in Porpunkah when the rain stopped but apart from that no one else had a flight. Monday the 5th the sky was pretty with more blue than grey, the forecast was for SE winds picking up during the day. So I packed up and headed towards The Pines ridge near Everton as its the only ridge that faces SE up here. For a start there were only Ray, Katrina and myself before a crowd of both hangies and paras started to turn up. By 11 o'clock the hill was crouded with no significant breeze up the face except from frequent wind cycles, so most of us decided to wait for better launch conditions.

Oli was first to launch at 11.30am followed by Stuie and a couple of other hangies and they slowly started to climb with a couple of paras, it didn't look very flash. However, they did pick the best part of the day as sky overclouding had most of thermic activity shut and soon bomb-outs started to happen one after the other.

Next day, Tuesday the 6th looked better for Mt Buffalo, so I headed up with Ray, Katrina, Murray, and Paddy and it looked a bit breezy but launchable on the ramp, with some cross wind blows but it doesn't take too long for the breeze to straighten up. By 11.30am I was ready to go first, just before I left the edge of the ramp I had the feeling of a solid positive bar pressure, followed by a 700fpm thermal just in front of launch. I took into that thermal and in less than a minute I was well above launch height.

Because of the SE wind thermals were drifting over the top of Buffalo, so I thought I'd head to hot-rocks and see if I might get better lift. I was surprised by the fact that hot-rocks wasn't working quite well and I only had few bubbles enough to extend my flight and when I realized I better get back to where I was cutting accross the middle I got drilled with hardly having enough altitude to make it to Burse. Those who launched after worked the thermal infront of launch upto cloudbase and didn't bother trying hot-rocks. There must be a sacrificial lamb for every flying day.


Start of launch run - Mt Buffalo Ramp





Airborne